A visit to the future

Alluring the thought to glimpse into the future, that mix of the mystical superstitions, the “bah humbug” attitude and the fatalistic feeling of all women to see their dreams come true…

She stepped inside, the cliche: heavy dusty dark velvet curtains, keeping out the sunshine and the harsh realities, creating an atmosphere of a different century, the decor nothing but cheap plastic emblems of magic, an over- powering smell of stale thick sweet smoke in the room. The old woman beckoned her to sit on an old wooden chair, while she sat in a deep red plush seat opposite the cloth covered table with the Crystal ball.

The old fortune teller motioned for her hand.

She stretched it across the divide and the woman took it in hers…for a moment she recoiled, her skin was like old parched paper, but she left it resting there. For the time being she studies it with her clouded eyes. Eyes that come back to her and focus on something she can not really tell, she follows them but sees nothing.

Outside the world no longer exists. The room is so quiet, except for the ticking of the clock and the odor is making her drowsy, her own eyes begin to get heavy…like a child waiting for it’s mother to begin the promised fairy tale at bedtime…she waits and listens.

She thinks she is wide awake, but the voice comes from far away. Her own hand in the weathered one, etched like by Rembrandt, a picture- she examines an image that appears a long stretched film, people on a bus, a building then an office, a computer screen, phone cables, voices all around, a detached feeling of riding exhausted back, somewhere food and then a bed and then sheets with wage calculations and bills: electricity company logos, water, gas and supermarket receipts, interchanging and merging into a string of numbers with euros
Icons, looming bigger again and again the same image…faces getting older around and the accounts increasing. In between, little windows appear with long lines at a window in some government agency, piles of paper falling from her bag, pleading with the wind not to scatter them and the executor smiling grimly at her incompetence… she can feel herself, slipping, falling into a dark vortex that is picking up speed and sucking everything into its dark pit..in it swirling are a photographs. Everything is out of order. Smiling with cherub cheeks, holding a new born baby in a hospital bed, hands on her hip in a bikini at a shower on the beach, counting pennies at the cash register, a bride in a wedding gown smiling radiantly, peeking into trash cans with a flashlight and poking at the contents with an iron, …bubbles rising from an abyss, teeth that fall from above, hands reaching to catch them, glances in to mirrors, unrecognizable women staring at her from the reflections. Something is moving in her chest…she feels a panic, while a hand settles around her heart! It’s becoming a struggle, she tries to shrug off this foreign grip, choking her, pulling the images into her heart, she wants to put an end to it, fighting the odor in the room…forcing herself to come up and shaking the icy cold hand in her chest…
Suddenly she is staring into a crystal ball! The old woman is saying something about her finances, they are looking good(please, fork out the 6 winning numbers!). She hears, but she does not comprehend, there is a man…she says, I can see him..
Oh God, this is not happening, I should not have…she stumbles out into the street.